THEORIES ABOUT BEAUTY, and therefore about art, have always fluctuated. Yet a major divide may be seen between the classical and the modern. In short, the classical viewed beauty as the mind making contact with something transcendent. The modern, in contrast, attributed beauty to functions of the brain, custom, and individual judgement.
The good news, I suppose, is that neither side has won out on this endlessly debated topic, which also means the classical view is not dead by any means. While philosophers have addressed every kind of beauty—in nature and in humans, for example—the definitions also have always applied to works of art. Indeed, that is where the debate began.
So we turn to Plato and Aristotle. They had diametrically opposite views on this topic. Plato said “The Beautiful” existed as essences beyond human grasp, yet which pointed the mind in that direction (especially through philosophical reflection). Otherwise, Plato was skeptical about visual art: that is because it could never emulate The Beautiful, and was thus not worthy of worshipful praise.
By contrast, Aristotle broke down the elements of beauty produced by artisans in a common sense way. Craftsmanship was to be admired. The experience of beauty, however, arose when such art objects—drama especially—provided the experience of “catharsis.”
Over time, in the Christian West, Plato’s idea, in revised form, was most persuasive and ended up giving a positive view of the beauty of visual art. This was possible by transferring Plato’s The Good and The Beautiful to the biblical God of the Hebrews: God was the Good and his mind contained The Beautiful. Thus, what God created was beautiful, as were the creations of godly human minds and motives. The Neo-Platonists, such as the fifth century Syrian mystic Dionysius the Areopagite, spoke for them all: “We call beautiful the thing which participates in [Platonic] beautifulness, because from it is imparted to all reality the beauty appropriate to everything, and also because it is the cause of proportion and brilliance.”
But it was not until Thomas Aquinas, who adopted the Aristotelian approach, that Christian thought analyzed the elements of beauty in art. As Aquinas famously said, “A thing is not beautiful because we love it; rather we love it because it is beautiful.” Taking a page from Aristotle, he said concrete beauty was this: “The first is integrity, or perfection, of the thing, for what is defective is, in consequence, ugly; the second is proper proportion, or harmony; and the third is clarity—thus things which have glowing color are said to be beautiful.”
This view held through the Renaissance, where we see a mix of Platonist and Aristotelian aesthetics (a term invented centuries later). The common ground was that the sense of beauty was innate to all human minds. And so the Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti would say that artistic perfection “excites the mind and is immediately recognized by it.” And: “When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind.”
This castle of theology and practical aesthetics finally was besieged in the early Enlightenment, when philosophers and “natural philosophers” (the early “scientists”) asked hard questions about the physical mind, putting aside all presumptions about transcendent essences of beauty.
The British philosopher John Locke was at the forefront with a new empiricism. In his Essay on Human Understanding, he said there are no “innate” ideas in the mind, but they rather accumulated by custom. The Scot David Hume took this further, arguing that nothing but opinion, based on selfish and bodily needs, defined higher judgments.
Then the ball was handed off to Emanuel Kant in Germany, who was troubled by Hume’s stark skepticism. Kant, who addressed aesthetic directly, sought a common ground. He said that while God and a divine universal beauty may exist, human “judgment” of beauty is constrained by “categories” of the mental process. In a somewhat unhappy conclusion, Kant held that judgment of beauty was “subjective”—that is, in the eyes of the beholder--yet he also argued that all human minds will generally make the same universal judgment on what is beautiful.
Kant threw aesthetics into turmoil, and while shreds of the classical “objective” view of beauty endured, it next was the scientists of perception, the visual system (i.e. biological eyes and nerves) and brain who stormed the field of aesthetics.
Here, the emblematic figures was Hermann von Helmholtz, who was first to discover how the visual system was a nervous system that had certain effects of pleasure or discomfort on the physical body. Before him, Isaac Newton and Johann Goethe had presented valid, if rival, theories on color, but Helmholtz gave an overview for the entire physical experience. Being a physicist and biologist, his tentative claims were succinct: Beauty brought comfort, or relaxation of nerves, to the visual experience. Discomfort was what jarred the eyes, and thus the brain and body. He was remarkably humble in his summary—a great deal of mystery remained, he said.
The next comers, the neuroscientists, were a bit less humble (as experimental hard scientists), as they developed the field of “neuroaesthetics.” The main conclusion was that the mind, which essentially sorts out a plethora of data, is satisfied by finding constants. These were the “essences” of neuroscience (not theology or philosophy), hardwired into the brain by evolution. The constants that satisfied the brain could be detected as early as infancy. In ways, this was a revival of Platonism (the idea of constants), but physically based.
Meanwhile, theories proliferated. Kant’s idea of “insight” was taken up by many art critics. It was a kind of mystical theory of beauty, but completely secularized. The connoisseur, by birth or training, was supposed to have a better insight than the commoner. Furthermore, as expected, other theorists tied beauty to Darwinian survival, class politics, sex, and the imprint of cultural custom.
Perhaps this is why the field of aesthetics is so avoided these days. The number of conflicting theories offer no way forward, except in partisan choices. For my money, the best evidence points back to a kind of balance that, arguably, points back to Plato. Beauty is a search for something constant, often blurred by diversity. Individual opinion—that is “taste”—fluctuates, but statistically the preponderance of people can agree what is beautiful in art.
So we are left to choose. Is that constancy in God’s mind or in essences behind nature? Or is it hardwired into the human brain? Either way, there seems to be a universal consent on what is beautiful. This may be so, even if we live in an age that goes by the motto of economists: “There’s no accounting for taste.”